Title page from the journal Blanchard
kept while lecturing for the American Anti-Slavery Society in Pennsylvania.

He left school in September of 1836
to become a lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Society, as one of Theodore
Dwight Weld’s “Seventy,” working to expand the reach of abolitionist thought
and action, for which Blanchard and others were scorned, mobbed, and physically
injured. After a year’s worth of travel and working alone throughout
Pennsylvania Blanchard decided to return to his theological studies, this
time at Lane Seminary in Cincinnati.